Top Chef fans will know Richard Blais as one of the enthusiastic molecular gastronomists/modern cuisine contestants. He's back on Top Chef: All Stars. But he also has a new show called Blaise Off which premiers tonight on The Science Channel (10 PM ET). And the first episode is about Pizza. My program guide tells me...

"Radical ideas for pizza bring the host to New York City in the opener of the series following culinary modernist Richard Blais as he attempts to reengineer traditional dishes with help from science and technology."

A couple of nights ago, I watched the Blais pizza segment again for the first ten minutes or so. What I was most interested in was to see how Patsy's makes its dough. From what I could tell, Patsy's uses high-gluten flour from Sassone's, which is a grocer in the Bronx and apparently also a supplier to Patsy's of the tomatoes for the pizza sauce, fresh yeast, water, and oil. I don't specifically recall seeing the salt added but it may have been in with the water. There was some discussion of wild yeast but it wasn't entirely clear to me what role it played, or maybe I missed the connection. Apparently the dough is fermented overnight, in which case wild yeast might be a factor, especially if the dough is fermented at room temperature, but even in that case the fresh yeast would overwhelm the wild yeast.

I watched this a few weeks ago. I was also mostly curious about the dough, specifically the sourdough issue, having read the thread here about it. From the way they described it, it sounded like they used a dried sourdough culture while making the dough. The shots of the yeast showed something that didn't look quite like commercial yeast, dry or otherwise, at least not the stuff available at a retail level. I could have sworn they said something about making it themselves, and Richard said something to the effect of 'so it's kind of like a mother dough' as the guy from Patsy's described it.

Is that even possible? I suppose with a cold-fermented dough, given enough of this dry sourdough culture it could reactivate well enough. If it isn't obvious, I'm a sourdough newbie If I had a more viable culture that didn't smell like nail polish remover (and taste about the same in the end product) I'd experiment myself.

Any thoughts?

I'm mostly just surprised they aired something showing him igniting charcoal on his home oven, given how litigious people are these days.

two different pizza makers from this site have been allowed in the back room to watch patsy's make dough. Both times they used commercial yeast, and no sourdough culture or starter or poolish of any kind. Just a standard high gluten flour with fresh commercial yeast and fridge fermentation of one day. I have personally seen them using two different high gluten flours, and an italian tomato mixed with a california tomato product, but never with the sassone name on anything. I think they sometimes try to throw people off course, or maybe they just buy whatever is on sale and the brand names change based on that. The real magic is in the oven, which for many years before the influx of italian ovens to NY was the fastest coal oven in the area, sometimes pumping out pies as fast as 2.5 minutes.